When Shaka King sits down at Boise State's Hemingway Center on the evening of October 21, 2026, he will be talking with a man who worked on his first feature. The conversation partner is Jim Wareck, an adjunct professor of producing and screenwriting in Boise State's Film and Television Arts Program, and a co-producer and line producer on King's first feature, the 2013 stoner comedy Newlyweeds. The event, titled "The Evolution of a Filmmaker: A Conversation," is a multi-media interview followed by an audience Q&A, free and open to the public.
That pairing gives the evening an unusual shape for a campus film talk. Rather than a visiting celebrity fielding questions from a moderator who met him backstage, this is a reunion between a director and a producer who worked together on a scrappy independent film long before either of them had the careers they have now. Wareck's faculty biography describes a two-decade detour through government and politics at the federal, state and municipal levels, plus lobbying and nonprofit advocacy, before he moved into film; he holds a master's in public administration from Columbia and a bachelor's from Vanderbilt, and is a member of the Producers Guild of America. His producing credits include When I Am Done Dying, a 2021 nominee for Turkey's submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film. But Newlyweeds is the credit that connects him to the man on stage.
King's path to that film ran through Brooklyn. Born in 1980, he grew up in Crown Heights and Bedford-Stuyvesant, the only child of two public school teachers whose families came from Barbados and Panama. He has described his upbringing as "very Afrocentric" — an early immersion in Black history and politics that would eventually shape his most famous work. Newlyweeds, which premiered in the NEXT section at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, follows two young lovers in Brooklyn whose shared passion for marijuana both holds them together and drags them down. In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine around the premiere, King traced the idea to relationships he'd had over the previous decade, leavened with imagination. "I've never been a repo man," he joked of the film's protagonist. He was candid about the drug's role in his own creative life: "It's been the ink in my pen many an afternoon."
He was also clear-eyed about why a low-budget film was liberating. "Part of the beauty of making this film on the cheap was that we were free to create our own space in the industry," he told the magazine. "We were only beholden to ourselves." The gamble paid off in a modest, meaningful way: at the 2014 Film Independent Spirit Awards, King received the Someone to Watch Award, which came with a $25,000 unrestricted grant. The honor, announced at the Spirit Awards nominee brunch in West Hollywood, is precisely the kind of recognition that keeps a first-time director in the game — and it is the sort of thing Wareck, as a producer and now a teacher, can speak to from the inside.
What came next was a leap in scale that few would have predicted from a stoner comedy. King directed, produced and co-wrote Judas and the Black Messiah, released in 2021, with Will Berson as his co-writer and a story credited to the pair along with Kenny and Keith Lucas. The film dramatizes the betrayal of Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, by FBI informant William O'Neal in late-1960s Chicago. Daniel Kaluuya played Hampton; LaKeith Stanfield played O'Neal; Jesse Plemons, Dominique Fishback and Martin Sheen rounded out the cast. It was King's studio feature directorial debut, made for a reported $26 million, and it arrived in a pandemic-era release landscape that kept its theatrical box office to roughly $7.5 million — a figure that says far more about the moment of its release than about its reach.
The awards story was the real measure. Judas and the Black Messiah received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay for King. Kaluuya won Best Supporting Actor, and Stanfield was also nominated in the same category — a rare double nomination for two performers from one film. The screenplay nod made King an Oscar nominee as a writer as well as a director, an acknowledgment of the years he spent researching and shaping the Hampton story.
That arc — from a Brooklyn stoner comedy shot on a shoestring to a six-time Oscar-nominated historical drama about the Black Panthers — is exactly the "evolution" the Boise State event promises to unpack. The program's framing suggests King will talk about craft and career in practical terms: how a filmmaker builds a body of work across film and television, how scale changes the job, and what it means to move between the independent and studio worlds. For students in the Film and Television Arts Program, the presence of a producer who worked on King's first film alongside a director who went on to Oscar night is an unusually concrete illustration of how careers in the industry actually unfold — through relationships, small films, and grants that buy time.
The venue fits the theme. The Hemingway Center, named for Idaho's most famous literary export, has long hosted the university's reading series and public conversations with writers; the address appears in campus listings both as 1819 W. Friendship Lane and as 1819 Cesar Chavez Lane. Bringing a filmmaker into that space extends a tradition of public craft conversations beyond the page. The event runs from 5 to 6 p.m., and there is no ticket and no capacity barrier to entry — just a room, a screen, and two people who have been making movies together, in one form or another, for more than a decade.